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Capmany J, Gasulla I, Sales S. Microwave photonics: Harnessing slow light. Nat Photon. 2011;5(12):731–3.
Abstract: Slow-light techniques originally conceived for buffering high-speed digital optical signals now look set to play an important role in providing broadband phase and true time delays for microwave signals.
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Tang L, Kocabas SE, Latif S, Okyay AK, Ly-Gagnon D-S, Saraswat KC, et al. Nanometre-scale germanium photodetector enhanced by a near-infrared dipole antenna. Nature Photonics. 2008;2:226–9.
Abstract: A critical challenge for the convergence of optics and electronics is that the micrometre scale of optics is significantly larger than the nanometre scale of modern electronic devices. In the conversion from photons to electrons by photodetectors, this size incompatibility often leads to substantial penalties in power dissipation, area, latency and noise. A photodetector can be made smaller by using a subwavelength active region; however, this can result in very low responsivity because of the diffraction limit of the light. Here we exploit the idea of a half-wave Hertz dipole antenna (length approx 380 nm) from radio waves, but at near-infrared wavelengths (length approx 1.3 microm), to concentrate radiation into a nanometre-scale germanium photodetector. This gives a polarization contrast of a factor of 20 in the resulting photocurrent in the subwavelength germanium element, which has an active volume of 0.00072 microm3, a size that is two orders of magnitude smaller than previously demonstrated detectors at such wavelengths.
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Gao J, McMillan JF, Wong CW. Nanophotonics: Remote on-chip coupling. Nat Photon. 2012;6(1):7–8.
Abstract: Scientists have demonstrated strongly coupled photon states between two distant high-Q photonic crystal cavities connected by a photonic crystal waveguide. Remote dynamic control over the coupled states could aid the development of delay lines, optical buffers and qubit operations in both classical and quantum information processing.
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Yao X-C, Wang T-X, Xu P, Lu H, Pan G-S, Bao X-H, et al. Observation of eight-photon entanglement. Nat Photon. 2012;6(4):225–8.
Abstract: The creation of increasingly large multipartite entangled states is not only a fundamental scientific endeavour in itself, but is also the enabling technology for quantum information. Tremendous experimental effort has been devoted to generating multiparticle entanglement with a growing number of qubits. So far, up to six spatially separated single photons have been entangled based on parametric downconversion. Multiple degrees of freedom of a single photon have been exploited to generate forms of hyper-entangled states. Here, using new ultra-bright sources of entangled photon pairs, an eight-photon interferometer and post-selection detection, we demonstrate for the first time the creation of an eight-photon Schrödinger cat state with genuine multipartite entanglement. The ability to control eight individual photons represents a step towards optical quantum computation, and will enable new experiments on, for example, quantum simulation, topological error correction and testing entanglement dynamics under decoherence.
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Fazal FM, Block SM. Optical tweezers study life under tension. Nat Photon. 2011;5(6):318–21.
Abstract: Optical tweezers have become one of the primary weapons in the arsenal of biophysicists, and have revolutionized the new field of single-molecule biophysics. Today's techniques allow high-resolution experiments on biological macromolecules that were mere pipe dreams only a decade ago.
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